Chris Rossi

Another example of Governments gone crazy…

As of last week, the South Australian government has decided that all R18+ DVDs must be sold in plain blank covers and kept in a separate part of the store (with the pornography). This is to “protect” children from seeing the covers of adult DVDs, which will somehow cause psychological damage to them.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,26596559-2682,00.html

This all started with a Family First politician (they’re also known as the “batshit crazy” political party), his 2 year old daughter accidentally picked up an R18+ DVD in a store and saw the cover. So now because of his failure as a parent he wants the rest of the state to suffer.

This may not sound like a huge problem, but for many stores it’s a massive headache to have to dedicate another section to these movies. It means Comedy, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi etc movies will be separated based on rating…”I’m looking for Event Horizon, is that in the MA15+ section or the R18+ section?”. Many stores will probably stop selling R18+ movies because it will be too much trouble.

And while I agree with protecting children from the content of R18+ movies, will hiding the covers really protect them? Let’s look at some examples of the R18+ movies that would be hidden from them:

Oh no! We can’t have children looking at offensive, dark, violent, pornographic covers like these!

But these are only MA15+, these are fine:

Severed fingers and legs, blood, and naked people…no I don’t have any problem with my children seeing that!

But men wearing suits, a robot man, 3 men with a baby and a chicken, and a star with people inside it…those are deeply offensive and could severely damage my child psychologically!

If this was a parliamentary bill to pass laws ensuring that DVD covers are PG rated, I could understand that. It’s incredibly unlikely that a child would steal the DVD and then watch it at home without their parents knowing. Or somehow unwrap the DVD and put it in the nearest DVD player, skip past the copyright notices and trailers, navigate the menu and watch enough of the film to get to something offensive, all without their parents noticing…

If that could happen in reality, I’d be forcing the parents to go through some kind of mandatory counselling, no parent should leave their child alone in a store for that long. If the child is old enough to steal the DVD, then they’re going to be old enough to find it in the adult section anyway, and nothing has been achieved.

This is a typical Family First politician overreacting, it sounds like a plot from The Simpsons (“won’t somebody please think of the children???”).  Just a few weeks ago they banned novelty cigarette lighters because “children *might* think they’re toys, and start fires with them”. So they’re banned, anyone who sells them will be fined. They never said “we’ve had a lot of police reports of children starting fires accidentally with novelty lighters”, they said “children might mistake them for toys”. Hopefully parents are keeping their lighters away from children anyway, whether they’re novelty lighters or not. If not, that’s a failure of the parents. Why should a responsible adult have to suffer just because of something that might happen.

Our state is now officially being run by these people: